by Skip Cohen

Along with all the new products introduced by Profoto at Photokina last month they also launched a terrific new video series, "A Week in a Photographer's Life". I shared the trailer a few weeks ago here in the Profoto Showcase. Knowing how busy you get, I'm betting most of you never went back to watch the entire series, and since it's Wednesday, it's the perfect video to share today.

What I enjoy most about Profoto's videos is how much great content they pack in short time spaces. You'll find a lot of good tips as Andreas Lundberg takes you through his thought process on a fashion shoot. Andreas is using just one D2 monlight with a silver deep umbrella.

I've been in Stockholm and understood his point completely when he talked about needing a quick set up for each image. The streets are narrow and the sun is moving fast, leaving Andreas minimal time to match each image with the vision in his mind's eye. I love the way this video ends, with Andreas at a train station looking at one of his images on a billboard!

The D2 is the world's fastest monolight with TTL. Check it out with a click on the D2 at the top of the page. And, take the time to check out more of Andreas Lundberg’s work on his website. He's an outstanding artist and sharing some stunning work.

Intro by Skip Cohen

I love the Rising Light series from Profoto. With each student they feature we're introduced to some incredible creativity and a future artist. I especially enjoyed this post loaded with great content thanks to Jens-Linus Lundgren-Widén.

Besides sharing some stunning food photography, there's another reason I wanted to share this post from Profoto's blog archives. So many of you, as established professional photographers, often have to photograph food. Sadly, many of you have had to learn "on the job".  Table top work is anything but your core focus, and the quality of the ultimate image is compromised or simply takes you an usual amount of time to capture.

So, a Rising Light profile about the work of a particularly talented Hallmark Institute student, Yael Pachino, seems to be a perfect way to help many of you improve your images. Even better is sharing a stronger thought process the next time you're put in a position of needing to capture stunning images of food. 

Check out Profoto's blog content and especially all of the new products recently announced at Photokina. Profoto is dedicated to not only building the best lighting equipment in the world, but also in helping to build the best photographers!

Visit the Profoto website and check out the new D2 and the Pro10, both new family members, and don't forget the Off Camera Flash System. Just click on any of the three thumbnails below.

 Jens-Linus Lundgren-Widén.

Rising Light is an article series highlighting promising photography students from all over the world. This month we introduce Yael Pachino, at Hallmark Institute of Photography, Massachusetts, and her mouth-watering photography.

Baltimore native Yael Pachino is big on food. Not eating food per se, though she does admit to it, but photographing food. And she’s good at it. Very good.
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Yael is currently a student at the Hallmark Institute of Photography in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. She fell in love with Hallmark after spending a day touring the facilities. In particular she was impressed with the number of portrait and still-life studios the school maintained along with an incredibly well supplied set of cameras, lenses, and lighting that was hers to utilize. Add to that an amazing faculty to get encouraged from while learning how to capture pictures of food that make you want to eat the page.

​For inspiration Yael refers to some of the well-known portrait photographers of our times. In addition to studying the work of prominent food photographers, it’s classic portrait photographers such as Irving Penn and Greg Heisler, with whom she recently spent 2-hours Skyping with, whose senses of style and compositions she instinctually resonates with. These are Yael Pachino’s heroes.

​Yael Pachino is particularly fastidious when it comes to lighting. Her sense of composition is impeccable, but it’s her innate sense of lighting that catches your eye. Her selective lighting style can best be described as theatrical stage lighting on a small scale.

​Rather than resorting to the soft, even walls of light you get from umbrellas or softboxes, Yael prefers to light her sets using one or more hard lights.

​Her photograph of the rum glass, is a classic example of her lighting methodology. The the main subject is lit from behind using a Profoto Acute2 Generator and AcuteD4 Head with a Profoto Zoom Reflector and BarnDoors that contain the light field around the glass. The balance of the elements within the frame are lit separately and indirectly by bouncing the light through a maze of reflectors and baffles. It’s pure stage lighting.

​The accompanying photographs were taken with a Canon EOS 5D MK III and Canon EF 24-70mm/f2.8L. Most of her images are composed at the longer end of the focal range and typically at wider apertures if not totally wide open.

As for future plans Ms. Pachino would like to see more of the world and learn about the foods people in different cultures.
                                  “Food is a special part of life and I want to see where my love for food takes me.”
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For starters she plans on spending time with family in Israel, learning more about middle-eastern foods, and taking mouth-watering pictures of whatever foods come her way.

Intro by Skip Cohen

Once again, Jared Platt does an outstanding job with another lighting tutorial from Profoto's blog archives. 

There are still too many of you who don't understand lighting and Jared, together with Profoto's dedication to education, are here to help you raise the bar on the quality of your images. This isn't just about chasing the ultimate image, but making your work the very best it can be. Understanding lighting, no matter what the source, gives you the freedom to shoot anywhere at virtually any time! Plus, there's no better way to separate yourself from your competitors.

Jared's using Profoto's B1 Off Camera Flash system in this tutorial. If you haven't taken one out for a test drive yourself yet, then it's time to visit a Profoto dealer. Also, check out their blog, there's new content almost every day introducing you to some of the the finest artists in the world with the lighting gear to match.

Check out more of Jared's work and pay attention to his workshop schedule. He's an outstanding educator and if he's teaching at any 

by Jared Platt

What’s the Difference? is a series of lighting tutorials. Each article responds to a single question. In this post, Jared Platt explains the difference between using a CTO gel and no gel.
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In the past few blog posts, I have been detailing various scenarios where I use a gel to color the light coming from my flash to match the ambient light, or to contrast against it with an opposite color gel. In the first post, we dealt with a cloudy, rainy, cold day where the sun’d ambient light was very blue because it was blocked by the clouds. In that case, the ambient light was at approximately 6500 kelvins, which is very blue in color. In our second challenge, we photographed indoors and battled it out with a 1960s army of 5000 kelvin florescent lights in an AmTrack train car. But in today’s example, we will race the sun for a portrait with an ambient light temperature of close to 1800 kelvins.

Now, the lower the temperature of light gets, the warmer it appears. And the sun, which never changes in its spot 93 million miles away, changes drastically in color temperature depending on what it has to go through to reach our eyes. The sun on a bright, clear day will be a slightly blue color and measure at around 5500 K, but on an overcast day, the light that reaches us will be much more blue, measuring at around 6500 K and on a dusty day in Phoenix, Arizona, the sun’s rays will travel through hundreds of miles of dust and atmosphere to give us a golden warm light that measures only 1800 K.​ 

​Now, you have heard that a flash has the same color balance as the sun. But this is only true when measuring the sun in the middle of the day on a bright clear day. As the sun is modified by clouds and atmosphere, the temperature will change up to one thousand three hundred degrees kelvin. So if you think your flash will always just match the sun, you are going to be shocked when you have to start monkeying around in Photoshop to correct for massive differences in your flash and the sun. This is why we have flash gels!

Correcting with gels
By adding a colored gel over the flash, we are able to change a fairly blue 5500 K light source and make it match the temperature of whatever ambient light source we are dealing with. In this case, the sun is just about to set, so it is traveling through a lot of dust and atmosphere, so the light is getting extremely warm. 1800 degree kelvin warm! Because we wanted both of our shots to have the same sunset glow, the entire shoot had to happen in mere minutes. From the first shot at 5:15 to the last shot as the sun dropped below the mountain at 5:28, the sun maintained that perfect fiery warmth. To show you the best comparison possible, we shot a couple frames without a gel and then ran to our lights, added our gels and ran back for a few more shots. And then, the light was gone.

We used a Profoto B1 Off Camera Light for our main light, just to the left of the model, which was modified by a Profoto Deep Silver Umbrella XL. I chose the Deep Silver Umbrella because it puts out a lot more light and I needed all the power I could get to do battle with the sun that was directly hitting the model’s left side. An additional B1 was placed to her left and slightly behind to help augment the natural hair light from the sun. The camera (a Canon 5D Mark III) was set at ISO 100, 1/100 sec at f 5.6 with a 70-200 2.8 L IS II lens at 95 mm.

There are two shots, one with and one without a gel. The Profoto OCF Gel Kits come with a full compliment of corrective gels and a gel holder that can fit on the flash head in conjunction with your various modifiers. In this case we used a bare head on one light and an umbrella on the other.

​Notice the gel holder on the bottom of the stand ready to be thrown on in an instant for the second shot. This is the preparation needed to get a comparison like this done when racing the sun.

The comparison

The first shot was taken with no gels. Keep in mind that the flash itself is a blue light source (5500 K) and matches the sun’s light temperature only at midday on a clear day. So when we use a flash to light someone against the extreme warmth of the sunset, there will be a big difference in the color of the two lights. If I use the white balance setting for flash, or daylight, the flash on the model will be neutral, but because of the extremely warm light coming from the sun, the neutral light will actually appear to my eye to be a colder or blue in color. This may or may not be the look you are attempting to produce. Make your subject look neutral and your background will go even more orange!

​The second shot only has one change, and that is the addition of a Full CTO, or Orange Gel. By adding the CTO to both flashes, we match the warm light coming from the sun, so that there is no hint of a color difference between the two light sources. Because the colors are the same, there is less attention drawn to the flash itself and it is more likely that the viewer will believe that the light is natural. Plus, because the two light sources match in color, I can change the temperature of the entire shot to add more warmth or to completely neutralize the warmth without a second thought. Keep in mind that you can use a Full CTO, 1/2 CTO, 1/4 CTO, etc. This means you can pick and choose the exactness of the match. Typically a 1/4 CTO is enough to keep the subject looking natural in a sunset situation, we were more aggressive with a Full CTO so you could really see a difference.

The conclusion

Most photographers seek out the sunset shot for weddings and engagement portraits and yet, they never give a second thought to the difference between their flash and the sunlight. From the image at the top, you can see the intense difference in the color shift on the model. So now it is time to up your game and do a better job at identifying the color of the ambient light you are shooting in and either match it with a gel on your flash, or at least know why you are not using a gel. Getting a cool blue bride on accident is just not a professional thing to do.

​Location: South Mountain, Phoenix, Arizona

The gear
1 x B1 Off-Camera Flash
1 x Umbrella Deep Silver XL
1 x OCF Color Gel Starter Kit
1 x Air Remote TTL-C

by Skip Cohen

Johan Wiberg is the Product Manager for Profoto's new D2 Monolight. I wanted to share this video, because it's the perfect example of the thought behind the technology Profoto puts into every product. As artists it's rare you get a chance to connect with the engineering team of any of the products you use.

I love this video because, step by step Johan is going to take you through the features/benefits of the new D2 just recently introduced. It's only a three minute video, but check out the amount of information he's about to pack into this short presentation.

Then, wander into a Profoto Dealer and check out what all the buzz is about. This is a company who never slows down on technology and support for the professional photographic community.